a place to reveal | a place to hide
There has been a flurry of letters and coverage in the press recently about the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research.
What I don’t think has been mentioned is: why is the museum named after the founder of Singapore?
As the Guardian puts it, the man was a “voracious wildlife enthusiast”.
I’m sure Raffles would be delighted if the Raffles Museum finds a large, permanent and accessible location.
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I have used the National Library’s microfilm collection a few times. They have issues going back to to the beginning of the Straits Times.
If you are searching for an article with microfilm, you have to know roughly when the article was published. The microfilms have a number of issues on each reel. You load it onto a special projector, then start scrolling through the film to find what you are looking for.
It’s manual and tedious - though strangely enjoyable, like a treasure hunt - but if you have absolutely no idea when an certain article was published, then you’re stuck. At very least, you need to know the month and the year.
So, I want to thank the National Library Board for coming up with http://newspapers.nl.sg/. (Thanks, Ai Lin, for pointing this out!)
NLB has scanned its Straits Times microfilms, so now the text is searchable. No more wading through rolls of microfilm. And you can discover other articles related to your search which you might not have been aware of.
If you search from home, you get article titles and short abstracts. The microfilm reel number is listed too.
You can only access full text and get prints if you’re at the library using one of their multimedia terminals. Or, since you now know the microfilm number, you can zoom in to the article faster. At least you know which reel it’s on! You still have to scroll through the film to get to a particular article. No shortcuts there.
It’s an amazing resource!
Will have to try “Malay Regiment” and “Battle of Pasir Panjang”. Already saw some interesting abstracts…
Microball by Serenity Nichols Ibsen
reproduced under a CC-BY-NC 2.0 license
A few strange warnings I’ve seen recently:
Say ‘No’ to illegal cigarettes.
As opposed to say ‘Yes’ to smoking?
Caution - Our coffee is fresh and hot.
If you’re going to caution me about your fresh coffee, I don’t think I want to know how putrid your stale coffee can get.
Real (Madrid) demolition shows we can beat United, says Babel.
Beat United, they might, come Saturday. But what does losing to Middlesbrough and drawing a whole host of games against mid-table Premier League teams show about Liverpool?
Computer games are a convenient target for recent incidents.
Comic by Randall Munroe from xkcd,
reproduced under a CC BY-NC 2.5 Generic License.
Twitter is really gaining traction.
Once it was the domain of geeks and geekettes. Now, it seems non-techies are getting in on the tweet too.
They are either signing up for accounts or asking about it.
Ironically, Twitter is a difficult thing to summarize. My attempt, within Twitter’s word limit:
Twitter is microblogging. A post in 140 characters, somewhat akin to SMS broadcast rather than SMS to an individual.
With 24 characters to spare too.
But I digress.
Siva highlighted #sgweathernow on Twitter.
By appending #sgweathernow at the end of your tweets, individual users can give others live updates on the weather wherever they are located in Singapore.
And the sgweathernow Twitter account provides hourly updates on Singapore’s weather. No need to visit NEA’s website, unless you want more details.
So now, everyone can talk tweet about the weather.
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